Strauss
David Nice
Poised when I met him six weeks ago between 40th anniversary celebrations of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, of which he has been a shaping chief conductor for the past five years and putting his new music directorship of Glyndebourne into action, Robin Ticciati hardly seemed like a man in positions of power, more an idealistic youth with a touch of the dreamer softening a powerful intellect.He was much the same, in short, as when I’d first encountered him sharing a 2009 Glyndebourne study day on Janáček's Jenůfa (Ticciati holding the score below) in the then-26 year old’s last Read more ...
David Nice
Mozart usually makes a fine concert bedfellow for his most devoted admirer among later composers, Richard Strauss. With the proviso that the 39th rather than the 38th Symphony would have made a better prologue to excerpts from Der Rosenkavalier last night – Mozart's later work has a minuet which Strauss imitates in the breakfast badinage of his Marschallin and Octavian, while the “Prague” Symphony has none – Sir Mark Elder made the companionship shine last night. The Barbican Hall took on a brightness for the Mozart, while the hall dazzled and spun as it must in any great Rosenkavalier Read more ...
David Nice
She is now the world’s leading interpreter of Richard Strauss’s Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, the aristocratic thirtysomething once forced into marriage with a far from ideal husband and determined not to let it happen to the sweet girl who falls for her own much younger lover on first sight. As a happily married woman, Anne Schwanewilms has no need of 17-year-old boys, and in her vocal prime she can have no regrets about ageing beautifully, but she shares both the Marschallin’s wit, with a wicked line in impersonating certain conductors, and her natural charm.Schwanewilms first beguiled Read more ...
David Nice
Last year a DVD appeared featuring the 15 winning performances from the start of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition up to 2011. I watched them all, skimming if any seemed a notch below par but staying with most. You could see the star quality and the promise in many who have since become great artists, including Karita Mattila, Anja Harteros and Ekaterina Shcherbachenko. But only two seemed like the fully finished article from the start: Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky in 1989 – the year Bryn Terfel won the Lieder prize – and American soprano Nicole Cabell in 2005, the Read more ...
David Nice
The big message of The Woman Without a Shadow, brushing aside the narrower, moral majority preaching that you’re incomplete without children, seems clear: fulfillment can’t be bought at the cost of another’s suffering. Yet the path towards that realization in this "massive and artificial fairy-tale", as an increasingly alienated Richard Strauss called it, is strewn with magnificent thorns in both his complex, layered music and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s elaborate symbolic libretto.Stagings tend to have gone either for a series of pretty, unconnected fairy-tale pictures to throw light and colour Read more ...
David Nice
Der Rosenkavalier, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 “comedy for music” about love, money and masquerading in a putative 18th-century Vienna, is a repertoire staple around the world. Continental houses throw it together without a moment’s thought, a single rehearsal (Felicity Lott memorably recalls a Vienna Staatsoper performance in which the first time her character, the Marschallin, met the mezzo singing the trousers role of her young lover Octavian was when they woke up in bed together at the beginning of the opera).Glyndebourne is different, with a luxuriously long Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No one could accuse Manchester’s musical forces of short-changing Richard Strauss on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. Under the title Strauss’s Voice, over two months three orchestras, eight conductors and a dozen soloists have delivered eleven concerts and several open rehearsals and talks. The enterprise has been led as a labour of love by 88-year-old Strauss authority Michael Kennedy, who started the series by enthusing about the composer’s ability “to exploit the radiance, eroticism, drama and tenderness of a voice”, especially the soprano voice.It fell to principal Read more ...
theartsdesk
Even more deserving of the sobriquet “the beautiful voice” than Renée Fleming, the natural successor who virtually copyrighted it, Kiri te Kanawa was one of the great sopranos of the 20th century. With those big, candid brown eyes and bone structure she’s still a beauty, as the images of her cameo role in the Royal Opera’s La Fille du régiment underline. The voice now – well, as I wrote in my review of Monday’s opening, it’s what you’d expect of a 70 year old with form. Last night was the big birthday with Downton Abbey butler Carson (Jim Carter) wheeling on the cake for that other stately Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s the thought that counts. That’s what we say about presents. But when the gift is a song by Richard Strauss it is that and more. He made a habit of gifting songs, particularly to his wife Pauline. Several of the Six Orchestral Songs on offer here, as the two-month Strauss’s Voice series marking the 150th anniversary of his birth nears its end, are taken from groups originally celebrating occasions such as their wedding day (10 September 1896).It was Sir Mark Elder’s turn to step up for his first appearance in the series, and he drew some glorious sound from the Hallé, while being Read more ...
philip radcliffe
“How tired we are of travelling,” the soprano sings, underscored by a solo horn. The end is near: “Is this perhaps death?” No fuss, no drama, but weariness and a calm acceptance. Since Strauss and his wife Pauline were in their eighties and living quietly in Switzerland when he wrote Four Last Songs, it is clear that they had come to terms with their inevitable demise. In the end musically, Strauss pays touching tribute to his wife, the soprano, and to his father, Franz, the horn player. Throughout, we have the soaring vocal line supported by the brass. Here, that combination reaches its Read more ...
philip radcliffe
There are occasions when just one band isn’t enough. Hence the rare experience of the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic joining forces for a performance, in the Strauss’s Voice series celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, of An Alpine Symphony under Juanjo Mena. With around 130 players at his command, on stage and off, along with wind and thunder machines, xylophone, castanets, cowbells and other paraphernalia, Mena had the palette for vividly bringing out all the richness of the orchestral colour.Since this was Strauss’s last tone-poem, 15 years in the making since a day Read more ...
philip radcliffe
It’s all about the voice – Strauss’s Voice, which is the title of the series of concerts being given by the musical forces of Manchester to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. It is becoming a happy custom these days for the Hallé, the BBC Philharmonic, the Manchester Camerata, the Royal Northern College of Music and Bridgewater Hall to collaborate on the big occasions. Over the next couple of months, they will between them present all the orchestral songs as well as great orchestral works in a dozen concerts and other events, devoted to Richard Strauss.As honorary patron of the series, Read more ...